SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland will be at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday as a panelist on the National Association of Voice Actors’ session “AI in Entertainment: The Performers’ Perspective.”
Crabtree-Ireland will join moderator Linsay Rousseau (Transformers: War for Cybertron) and panelists Ashly Burch (Mythic Quest), Cissy Jones (The Owl House), SAG/AFTRA negotiating committee member Zeke Alton (The Calisto Protocol) and NAVA president and founder Tim Friedlander (Record of Ragnarok) to discuss the existing legal structures in regards to AI and the new standards that need to be implemented that will protect voiceover actors.
While the AMPTP heralded a “groundbreaking” proposal they made to SAG-AFTRA in regards to AI, the actors guild wasn’t happy, with Crabtree-Ireland telling press recently that both sides were “pretty far apart” and that a lot was still required to protect background actors from getting their likeness and images protected.
AMPTP said in a statement last week: “The claim made today by SAG-AFTRA leadership that the digital replicas of background actors may be used in perpetuity with no consent or compensation is false. In fact, the current AMPTP proposal only permits a company to use the digital replica of a background actor in the motion picture for which the background actor is employed. Any other use requires the background actor’s consent and bargaining for the use, subject to a minimum payment.”
In a guest column on Deadline today, Crabtree-Ireland wrote that a proper deal with AMPTP must include “Protections against actors and performers having their identities and talent taken from them using AI without informed consent and pay.”
He added: “Studios and workers can both win. This doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game,” also saying, “Studio and streamer CEOs: it’s time to step up, get personally involved, and come to the table.”